[Fwd: F#]

Manuel M. T. Chakravarty chak@cse.unsw.edu.au
Mon, 03 Jun 2002 17:51:59 +1000


"Don Syme" <dsyme@microsoft.com> wrote,

> One point is that in the absence of extensive purity
> annotations to imperative libraries you will need to use
> monads for operations that shouldn't need them.  Having to
> add the annotations certainly counts as a complication in
> comparison to what many other languages have to do on
> .NET.

That's certainly not a .NET-specific issue and it sounds a
bit like the arguments against statically-typed languages
while everybody else thought that without dynamic typing
languages are too restricted.

> As for monads, this is hardly the place to go into an
> argument about their relative merits re. all those
> slightly more widespread approaches to imperative
> programming.  If you think driving imperative libraries
> using monads will be so great then a Haskell.NET would
> certainly be a perfect place to try out that theory. 

As I said, this is hardly .NET-specific and we have had no
problems with huge libraries, such as GTK+ and HOpenGL.

Manuel